Application servers are increasingly used to simplify application development, to facilitate application distribution, for scalability purposes, and for a variety of other reasons. Responsiveness and throughput of applications running inside an application server may be affected based on the performance of the application server. Consequently, application server monitoring is increasingly important to ensure the application server has sufficient resources to support the applications that execute in the application server.
Often an organization has multiple application servers, and it may therefore be desirable to remotely monitor the application servers such that a single monitoring agent can consolidate the performance metric data obtained from the application servers.
It would be desirable for such communications to be secure, such as being encrypted, so that the performance metric data cannot be accessed by unintended recipients and used for undesirable purposes.